(THE CONVERSATION) As the public conversation about climate change gets increasingly serious, many Americans may be wondering: How do my individual choices affect climate change?

Household consumption – food, housing, transportation, apparel and other personal services – is an important contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Everything you eat or wear, or every time you drive, you add to the global total emissions. The typical American’s annual per capita carbon footprint is over five times the world per capita average.

We found that over 20% of all U.S. emissions are directly attributed to household consumption. If you consider indirect emissions, this figure is closer to 80%.

Let’s zoom in on the latest available annual numbers, mostly from 2009, which give a better sense of these staggering impacts.

U.S. households generate 5.43 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions every year. About 82.3% of those emissions are produced domestically.

The remaining emissions are generated outside the U.S. These emissions come from global supply chains. For instance, the family car might have been manufactured abroad. So emissions from manufacturing of the car are created outside the U.S., but the emissions from tailpipe are domestic.

Transportation and housing contribute over 60% to the total domestic carbon footprint of U.S. households. Supply chain emissions from services – such as health care, banking and lodging – and food contribute the next largest amounts.

Food, furnishing and supplies, and clothing are the three largest drivers of overseas emissions from U.S. households.

2. China bears the brunt of overseas emissions

The overseas carbon footprint driven by the U.S. households is distributed disproportionately among countries.

The most considerable portion of overseas carbon footprint of U.S. households is actually released in China, followed by Canada, India, Russia and Mexico.

While the most substantial amount of the U.S.‘s overseas carbon footprint is from China, it is only 3.0% of China’s domestic emissions. The majority of China’s emissions comes from the activity of its inhabitants, as well as consumption in other countries beyond the U.S.

On the other hand, Canada, Mexico and Taiwan trace a sizeable proportion of their domestic emissions to U.S. household consumption.

3. Wealthier families have a larger footprint

A household’s carbon footprint generally increases with its income, ranging from 19.3 to 91.5 tons of CO2-equivalent annually.

The average carbon footprint of the wealthiest households is over five times that of the poorest.

In 2009, households with less than US$30,000 annual disposable income made up 25.7% of the total U.S. population, but were only responsible for 19.3% of U.S. households’ carbon footprint.

On the other hand, wealthy consumers with more than $100,000 annual household income accounted for 22.3% of the total population but were responsible for nearly one-third of households’ total carbon footprint.

4. The Great Recession caused a dip

U.S. households’ carbon footprint had been steadily growing from 1995 until 2005, when it began to plateau.

In 2009, the combined domestic and overseas footprint dropped by 8.5% from the previous year, mainly due to the Great Recession.

The share of overseas carbon footprint in total carbon footprint of the U.S. household consumption had been rising steadily and peaked at around 20% in 2006. After 2006, the share of overseas carbon footprint started to decrease, as imports slowed down before the recession.

5. Transportation makes the biggest difference

The variations of household carbon footprint from 1995 to 2014 were largely driven in transportation use, including emissions from vehicle manufacturing, fuel and public transportation.

In 2016, for the first time in history, the emissions from the U.S. transportation sector surpassed the power sector emissions. This fact along with our observation from household carbon footprint from transportation underscore the importance of policy efforts related to emissions from the transportation sector.

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